Devoted to tips and other info on how to use your Mac to read and write languages other than English

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

Typing Hawaiian

OS X includes a special keyboard layout for the Hawaiian Language (ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi), which puts the macron vowels which it uses (ā ē ī ō ū) on the Option key of the normal letter. This layout also replaces the normal apostrophe (') with the Unicode "modifier letter turned comma" ʻ (U+02BB) used by Hawaiian to represent the glottal stop (ʻokina). ( For the normal apostrophe you can type Option + ', and for the left single you you type for Option + ] )

If you put ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi at the top of the list in System Preferences/International/Languages you may be surprised at how your files sort by name, since they will follow the order of the Hawaiian alphabet, with the English letters Hawaiian doesnʻt use tacked on at the end: a e i o u h k l m n p w ʻ b c d f g j q r s t v x y z.

4 comments:

Anonymous
said...

As in colour management so in character management, always input the coded colour or character correctly and consistently or configuring for compatible assumptions collapses. If the glottal stop consonant is input as accent grave by one author, apostrophe by another author, and so on an so forth, it is not possible for audiences to make assumptions about what character code to configure as universal identifier for the glottal stop consonant of the second official writing system of the State of Hawaii.